Robert Sharp

A couple of weeks ago at the Labour Party Conference, Gordon Brown pledged to “enshrine in law Labour’s pledge to end child poverty” although the specifics were hazy.  The Campaign to End Child Poverty staged a march in central London yesterday, urging the government to spend more on eradicating child poverty.

The campaigners said that next year’s budget is the last opportunity for the Government to invest to ensure it hit its target of halving child poverty by 2010 - A crucial waypoint en route to complete eradication by 2020.  However, the campaigners (and likely Gordon Brown too) may be suffering from short-term thinking, a target mentality that makes the longer fight against poverty harder to win.  In an article published on Comment is Free earlier this year, my colleague Ian Mulheirn makes the case for scrapping the 2010 target, in favour of a renewed focus on the 2020 goal.  While the 2010 goal can be solved by another £3bn in tax credits (the policy the campaigners are marching for), the 2020 goal will be solved by more long-term measures, such as increased, targeted spending on education:

Further spending in pursuit of the 2010 target would divert precious resources into tackling the symptoms of child poverty while neglecting its underlying causes. …

…the 2010 and 2020 poverty targets now represent distinct visions of how to tackle child poverty. As money becomes scarcer, they are increasingly becoming opposing visions. It is clear that the provision of real equality of opportunity, represented by the 2020 target, rather than the palliative of tax credits, should now be the priority.

Amid the cacophony of speculation about the future of Gordon Brown’s premiership, the imminent electoral meltdown, and the future direction of the Labour party, I think one aspect is being marginalised, which is the future of the party at a local level, and in local government. It is clear that current crisis is playing out on a national level, with national and international problems catalysed by Westminster intruigue and a failure of national leadership that can speak to the concerns of the people.

Now, the fall-out from this is obviously felt at the local level, as Labour’s loss of councillors in the May elections demonstrates. But it is not clear that the existential worries currently afflicting Gordon Brown and his parliamentary colleagues are shared by their Labour friends on local councils. In Tower Hamlets, for example, the Labour group recently increased their majority after four defections from Respect, and a by-election win (after a popular Lib Dem councillor stood down for health reasons, no less).

Of course, if the local parties are not suffering from the same crisis of purpose, this is probably to do with the differences between the nature of local and national governance. Localities like Tower Hamlets have very specific problems, to which a Labour council can confidently respond within their current ideology, without having to worry about national unity, or whether the same policy would be effective in different boroughs.

So, as the columnists and bloggers search in vain for a viable alternative to Brown, and a new direction for the party, I wonder whether the most coherent and confident voices might come from local government, rather than the national scene, policy wonks, or the unions. They are ideally placed to comment on pressing issues such as community cohesion and knife-crime, and how other concerns such as the environment and immigration can be dealt with in practice.

These are purely my anecdotal thoughts - what are the thoughts and experiences of other Liberal Conspiracy readers and writers?

Cross-posted at Liberal Conspiracy.

Cassilis says that a little humility would have served Hillary well, and concludes by making a comparison with British politics:

Quick final thought - let’s look at that Clinton character sketch again:Formidable intellect and an impressive grasp of detail and policy; Perceived lack of warmth and an inability to smile with any sincerity; High-minded approach to politics and a dismissive attitude towards opponents; Brooks no dissent; Long-time association with a previous administration.

Ring any bells? I know, I know - my more cynical readers will think this is where this post was headed all along but I assure you that wasn’t the case. The parallels with Brown are striking - the one obvious difference of course being he’s already got the top job.

This reminds me of a thought I had last week, after the New Statesman asked “Is there a British Obama?” Surfing on the wave of the Illinois Senator’s paradigm shifting campaign, the New Statesman was asking where Britain’s first black prime minister is lurking. I remember thinking that you don’t need to be black to be the British Barack.

Because the momentum behind Obama’s candicacy is due to more than his skin colour. It is as much about dynamism and youth, and about challenging Hillary’s lock on the nomination. It is about the profoundly democratic notion that we shouldn’t have coronation nominations. The Americans seem to have embraced this idea, and managed to confound the cynics by actually delivering this unexpected political turn-around.

The comparable events in Britiain took a much more predictable, cynical turn. David Miliband could have fulfilled the Obama role, bursting Brown’s aura of inevitability.  We know he considered the posibility of a challenge, but in the end he took the path of least resistance. Gordon the Glazier had installed a glass ceiling his own, with only one person above it, and no-one (black or white) had the courage to try and break through.

After the terror attacks in London and Glasgow, there’s obviously been a lot of analysis and opinions flying around, from the mainstream media, security analysts, bloggers and the general public. Its interesting to see how most people are adhering to the idea that life should go on, and that these attempted suicide attacks should not provoke a draconian curb in civil liberties. To do so would hand the terrorists a victory.

For what its worth, I think Gordon Brown, Jacquie Smith and Alex Salmond have hit the right note, with their calls for unity and calm. Dave Hill seems to agree.

Over at the Devils Kitchen, Nosemonkey makes an interesting, if flippant point in the comments:

I believe in taking the piss when they cock up, and diminishing the status of the terrorist bogeyman. Terrorists exist to spread terror - make them a figure of fun, they fail, even if the occasional success does manage to kill a few score people and freak us out for a bit.

I’m not sure about making jokes about the attack, although I would suggest that the “life goes on”, “I’m not bovver’d” attitude also contributes to the diminishing returns of terrorist attacks in the UK.

Now I know why its called the Grauniad. Today’s front page heralds the new Labour Party leadership with a photo of the happy couple.

A victorious Harriet Harman joins Gordon Blair on stage in Manchester.

With all this talk about Tony Blair taking on some role as a Middle-East envoy for the US, no-one seems to have remembered that he will still be a Labour MP after he steps down as Prime Minister on Wednesday. He won’t be able to go galavanting off to Palestine if Gordon Brown’s whips’ office needs him for a crucial division on housing reform.

The only way he will be able to take George Bush up on his offer is if he resigns as an MP, forcing a by-election… or if Prime Minister Brown calls an early election. Perhaps Tony knows something we don’t…

I was surprised by the matter-of-fact manner in which the BBC announced Harriet Harman as deputy leader of the Labour Party. I genuinely expected a Pop Idol style build up, with the camera flitting between Johnson, Benn, Blears and the rest… before Ant or Dec or Fearn shouts the winner to fireworks and a shreiking audience.

In the absence of the stalwarty DoctorVee, I have edited this week’s Scottish Roundup. I actually found trawling through loads of politicians’ blogs quite encouraging. People have a genuine passion for making things better (although of course, they all have a slightly different conception of how that might be achieved). Yes yes, I know “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”… but so is the forked path to progress and prosperity.

I included in the round-up a post from Rhetorically Speaking, about the fact that the Executive have legislated in favour of women being allowed to breastfeed in public. Much has been made recently of Labour’s frenzied approach to law-making, with apparently a new law being made every three hours since they came to power. I wonder how many of these were laws that affirmed a citizen’s rights, as opposed to laws which took rights away?

Update

Just spotted a post from Tim Worstall on the issue. There are some pertinent points in the comments. My favourite is from Little Black Sambo:

This is entirely consistent with the new understanding of law. The purpose of making a law is to “send a message”.

It seems a couple of rather illiberal policies seem to have found their way into the Scottish Labour Party campaign.

The first, which is part of the manifesto, is to “retain the DNA samples of all crime suspects“.

A common argument from civil liberties campaigners is that such a policy effectively makes people into permenant crimminal suspects. However, I am not so sure that this would blight your outlook, in the same way that young ‘hoodies’ become demoralised by the feeling that they are always under suspicion. Or does the hidden nature of the suspicion make it more sinister? Either way, more worrying is the possibility that the DNA database could be comprimised: either accidentally, in which case a ‘false positive’ result could convict an innocent person of a crime they did not commit; or on purpose, with a person being framed for monetary or political gain.

One reason why our laws have been structured as they are, is to protect innocent people from mistakes, maladministration and malign intent. The careful procedures for the collection (and then destruction) of bodily fluids and DNA samples are in place precisely so that the chain of evidence remains intact, and therefore beyond question. Weakening this chain weakens the justice system.

The second policy is the Instant ASBO:

Scottish Labour this week revealed plans to create new ‘instant ASBOs’ to allow the police to take immediate action against the small minority who disrespect and undermine our communities, without having to go through the normal court process. The tough new measure will be available to use by new community policing teams and will stay in place until the offender can convince a court that they have changed and will not offend again.

This is a 180 degree reversal of the “innocent until proven guilty” principle. It is true that methods for establishing law and order could be made more efficient, but eliminating the very principles of law upon which our system is founded is the wrong solution to the problem. Its like being asked to solve a mathematical equation, and simply changing the answer to fit your workings out.

Laws with integrity, which everyone perceives to be fair and just, form bonds that keep communities together. What is so tragic about these proposals is that they will undoubtedly be subjected to their first test in those poor and ethnic minority and communities that (the politicians keep telling us) need a little more social cohesion. The first instant ASBO will not be issued on the red granite streets of leafy Newington, but on the grey concrete schemes of Sighthill. These policies will experience their first malfunction among the under-privileged youths that Labour is so eager to help. They will breed indignation and a sense of injustice long before anyone feels safe, free, or empowered.

If we can rely on anything in 2007, it is that the dismal state of political debate we now have in this country will continue. Philip Webster in The Times reports on the latest example of vacuous thinking:

The Government is to recruit 100 people to help miniters to shape policies on the public services for the next decade … The people, selected by market research organisations as a cross-section representative of the population, will be asked to put themselves in the shoes of the Government’s decision makers

The most terrible irony of this policy, is that it will propagate the problem it has clearly been devised to counter – that of a disconnection between ‘ordinary’ (whatever that means) voters, and the politicians who rule us. At its core, the idea assumes that politicians are not ordinary people, and necessarily so. This might be true on some levels, but if we have reached the stage where a politician is someone who, by definition, cannot know what ordinary people want, then I fear for our salvation.

True, there are policy-wonks and journalists, residents of the fabled ‘Westminster Village’, who have become MPs, but there are also plenty of politicians on the green benches who have also lived in what we might call ‘the real world’ (indeed, no MP would ever claim that this was not true of them).

Has the idea that our political representative should be somehow, well, representative of our views, gone out of fashion? I have always assumed that each MP had his or her ready-made focus group: We call them constituencies, and their members are a perfect representation of the public, a better barometer than anything emulated by market-research companies.

Picking a tiny group of people to advise ministers would seem to by-pass the in-built ‘sovereignty’ of the constituents. The views of the latter group are trumped by those of the former, and I forsee a situation where a stamp of approval from this advisory committee of ordinary people is taken as a sign of a successful policy… regardless of whether the policy has done any good in the real world. This would be typical. If public services are now orientated to the meeting of targets which signal success, rather than actually delivering successful services… it is somehow apt that this same, brain-dead principle is also applied to the act of governing itself.

How depressing. We elect politicians precisely so they can govern. We expect them to make decisions based on what they think our best interests are. In fact, making decisions is the only thing we ask them to do. Asking approval from a cabal of annointed wise men implies that those who currently hold ministerial posts lack the confidence to carry out this one task! If that is the case, the solution to the problem is to employ (i.e. elect) someone else who can do the job themselves, without outsourcing the task to an unelected panel.

Finally, the policy overlooks the crucial possibility that what is popular is not always what is right. Will a minister always take the advice of the panel? If so, then we have a serious democratic crisis on our hands. If not (and we already know they will not) then they are essentially just another group of unelected advisors. Why bother?

There is a horrible ‘meta’ level to this entire idea. It is as if someone in a focus group somewhere has suggested that “giving the public more of a say” would be a good idea, and this policy has been devised on that basis. It has not been created to actually influence policy, just to give the appearance that the government is in touch, and listening. If the government wishes to achieve this impression, it could do so much more effectively through parliament, its MPs and their constituents. As an added bonus, the general public may actually get to have more of a say in how their services are delivered. No extra layer is necessary.